Space Program Needs To Be Down To Earth

David Ress

The shuttle crew waited, hearts thumping, for the surge into the sky. Smoke billowed out from the roaring engines, the count-down tension, with just three seconds to go, mounted.

And then a computer shut down NASA's 54th shuttle mission, because of a problem with an engine valve.

As NASA experts scramble to figure out what, precisely, went wrong with Columbia, it may be time for a classic economist's question: what return are we getting from our space program?

We're in space to explore.

Exploration, of course, is thrilling. Nobody can see the shuttle leaping into space, or watch astronauts spacewalking with the blue Earth far below them, without feeling stirred.

But societies organize themselves for exploration for a reason - and not an abstract, emotional one, either. Spanish, French and British explorers helped make their countrymen rich. We learned the lay of our own Western lands because voyagers and mountain men ranged deep into the wilderness in search of fur.

The economic payoff from the space program, as it is now run, seems much less clear.

While everyone's resigned to the notion that getting into space is costly, going there by shuttle seems particularly expensive.

One reason is that there aren't many shuttles. Any problem, even a small one, can effectively shut down space exploration for months at a time.

Another reason is the seven people who fly each shuttle. To keep them alive requires a massive effort, in engineering, in maintaining equipment, in monitoring each and every shuttle mission. Some 30,000 people work keeping shuttles flying.

The shuttle is supposed to help pay its own way by launching satellites, but it seems very much like robbing Peter to pay Paul to think of launching U.S. government satellites as a source of income for a U.S. government agency like NASA. And many space experts say it costs a lot less to get a satellite into space by using a disposable rocket like the Europeans' Ariane.

Well, O.K. Maybe space ships shouldn't be like a fur trader's canoe, full of profitable cargo.

Some of what space shuttles do is a version of classic exploration, carried out by things like the Hubble Space Telescope, which can peer farther into space that we can from Earth, so that we can learn things we'd have no hope of learning by remaining stuck on the planet surface.

Some of that exploration ought someday to pay real dividends. After all, over the past few decades, there's been plenty of abstruse research into physics that has.

But some of what space shuttles do is experiments like the medical tests on about 240 tadpoles and 240 fish larvae that the U.S.-German crew for Columbia's nine-day mission was to carry out. In January, the Endeavor's crew studied whether frog eggs could be fertilized in space. Last year, shuttle crews explored how jellyfish swim in zero gravity.

The possible benefits from this kind of research seem more limited than what space telescopes could potentially yield. Research into how animals fare in space - or, for that matter, into how humans fare in space - is probably useful for only one thing. And that's to tell researchers what happens to living creatures when they are not on Earth.